WHAT THE SOUL DOESN’T WANT

Freehand Books, 64 pages, $16.95 Nowadays, it’s not fashionable to write poems that refer openly to the soul. But throughout Lorna Crozier’s long career as a lyric poet — this is her 17th collection — the spiritual has been a constant, along with a reverence for the natural world and a sly humour. These hallmarks are all on display here: there are whimsical tributes not just to the overlooked but the downright scorned (the cockroach), as well as the not-so-garden-variety eggplant (“a summer trumpet that makes no sound,” as she puts it). But the book’s most powerful poems turn toward weightier subjects: grief, mortality, the passage of time and, yes, the soul’s longings. Crozier writes with spare but luminous clarity and her metaphors are resonantly rooted in the senses: in one poem grief is “a snowdrift that thickens/as you walk”; elsewhere it’s embodied by lilac, “the colour of her eyelids/when she doesn’t see you any more.”